If you would like more information about what’s happening in Oregon, please FReepmail me. Please send me your name by FReepmail if you want to be on this list. People with serious alcohol or drug addiction in the U.S. regularly go to doctor’s offices, clinics and hospitals, only to leave after receiving insufficient or no treatment, often with devastating consequences.
Could be that the staff is suffering from revolving door burnout when it comes to treating these people who get treated, and recover from one incident only to seek out more drugs or more alcohol? Staff is doing their best with limited time and resources especially in a large urban hospital. They are working ER they are obligated by law to treat but that treatment does not have to see to it that the reason the patient came in is permanently cured. Admission might be advisable but that could depend on whether a bed is available and who is on call for consult. In my opinion this outcome was going to be this man’s fate from the first moment he started using drugs. The ER staff is not to blame. Oh and the ER is most likely independent from the actual hospital.
National Pravda Radio. Trying to start a Saint George Floyd riot in Oregon? *SHRUG*
What a pant load! Equating a heart attack to a drug addict bent on killing himself? This doctor is a quack.
“I think we should be outraged every single time someone dies from any condition that has treatment available that someone isn’t getting,” said Dr. Judy Chertok, who treats addiction patients and teaches medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. “We would not allow, as a society, people with heart attacks to come to a hospital and not get appropriate treatment. This is as serious as that.”
No, it is not as, ‘serious as that.’
If you abuse drugs and/or alcohol to THAT extent, you are NOT on the same playing field as those that have REAL medical conditions.
Sorry. Lost a nephew to a drug overdose. Lost a family friend who was only 37 to the ravages of alcohol addiction.
There is help around EVERY CORNER for these addictions. If you chose NOT to seek the help that is readily available to you to save your own LIFE, that’s on you.
He was suffering from a “medical” condition he caused, I don’t see how medical staff is more responsible for him than he is himself.
Couldn’t finish reading the article. Gussied up bulls**t.
The only overdose patients I have seen who leave the hospital have refused treatment, and left on their own. With no assistance in leaving.
One problem for the “journalist”. Naloxone doesn’t work for very long. About 60-90 minutes. If patient had large overdose of long acting opioid product, the naloxone could wear off and the patient could start having overdose symptoms.dont think journo knows that.
There are so many addiction programs available.This is an incompetent person problem. Sad, but true. Just don’t want help, or incompetent. Even doctors die of OD. It is a human problem. Tugging at the heart strings to justify medical payments to fraudulent addiction treatment centers.
Sorry to be so cynical, but the articles goes nowhere in addressing the whole problem. Sounds like AI generated b.s.
Not one of the tens of millions of dollars overfunded NGOs ever reached out to this man to help him. Zero.
So now we need to anticipate what the druggies are doing or going to do...hospitals are baby sitting now..this is why I can’t get into see a cardiologist...waiting over 5 months for an appt.
I’m amazed my local hospital is still open. They are continually screwing up. My uncle went in there thinking he was having a heart attack, and they told him it was heartburn and sent him home. He drove himself to a different hospital out of town and had double bypass surgery.
The one most responsible is the addict himself.
Bring back the State mental institutions, where people that can’t survive on the outside can be involuntary committed by courts or family. When we still had that system, there weren’t hopeless people sleeping and sh*tt*ng in the city streets.
Drug abuse and a great deal of homelessness is a psychiatric problem and these people should be in a mental institution.
Sadly... The Psychiatric ‘experts’ who ran these institutions convinced everybody that the streets would be a better place for their patients to be unhoused, rather than be housed in mental institution where they (the Psychiatrist) would need to deal with them on a 24/7 basis.
They managed to convince politicians and society in general that ‘not dealing with mental illness’, is a better medical practice than dealing with mental illness.
How freaking batsh*te crazy is that???
Screw any medical professional who believed in masking and safe distancing , especially any of them who said the jab was a vacine . And screw any non medical professional who said the same .
There has always been a lot of hostility towards addicts whether it’s drugs, booze, or smoking.
Some non-addicts got to experience that treatment during COVID with many saying “We’re not going to treat you if you’re not vaxxed” stuff, along with other social exclusions.
From the perspective of doctors and nurses who have this hostility, it can be boiled down to one word:
Pride
As the expert in health, such ones take great offense if you do not follow their instructions for averting illness and in response basically just say, well screw you.
However this does not apply to other areas where people may not follow healthy advice:
You never hear anyone say, well if you don’t stop having gay sex, we’re not going to treat you for AIDS.
If you don’t stop playing football or boxing, we’re not going to treat your concussion.
And if you consider that if two virgins marry and stay true, the closest thing they’d get to an STD is a yeast infection, so there goes STD treatments for anyone who doesn’t follow church advice right?
This hostility is the kernel for the Chinese social credit system. In the US, we have it built into insurance where commie care first introduced charging more for smokers and obese (obese subsequently removed - too many fat lawmakers, I guess).
Penalizing riskier behavior would be ok if it’s proportional to the risk vs actual payouts and you don’t pick and choose which risky behaviors to penalize or not.
E.g., Are people who play contact sports penalized? There is plenty of money spent treating sports injuries and if you happen to be a teenager who’s paralyzed during football that’s quite a lot of expenses to incur over a long lifetime. But such participation is considered “healthy” and may actually get you a credit.
Insurance companies have the data. They can correlate payouts to certain behaviors easy.
There is also the circumstance when risk is replaced by certainty in increased payouts, e.g. being born with type I diabetes - you need insulin, et al, for life. Should they be charged more? or not because it’s “not their fault”?
So insurance is required to charge more for someone who MAY get sick in the future, but not allowed to charge more for those who ARE sick now because it’s “pre-exisiting”.
Like the social credit system in China, folks want to use insurance as punishment and only for the risky behaviors they don’t like.
A POS is dead...I’m good.
“That guy does not need to be dead right now”
And yet, his poor choices and poor state of health are moving him toward dying with near certainty. Only a matter of how long before it happens. Do we instead want a universal protocol approach to screening and treatment, one that includes involuntary committment for a long enough period to detox and start living without the subastance abuse? Beyond that it would be up to them. But we could return to institutionalizing hopeless chronics in re-opened facilities. Many will still die but they won’t be able to be emotionally portrayed as abandoned by society.
So they want hospitals to turn into free hotel and maid services for addicts who go out, overdose, and come in covered with feces, and are to be cared for lovingly with unlimited funds so that as soon as they recover, they can go out and do it again.
I’ve seen both sides of this issue. First, a hospital is not a drug rehab. It is not the hospital’s job to ensure that an addict does not relapse when they release him, even if they know he will immediately go back to using drugs upon release. I know NPR is creating this sob story to suggest that hospitals should somehow be responsible to care for hardcore street addicts but that just isn’t going to happen. NPR is naive or ideologically blind if they think anyone can care for a hardcore street addict short of forced incarceration, which a hospital staff can’t do. Which brings us to the solution that NPR doesn’t want to hear - forced incarceration in a long-term rehab. There is surprising consensus on this solution apart from the ideological extremes. It is the only - and I mean only - way to help a hardcore addict.
And this is a sad story, how?
If you would like more information about what’s happening in Oregon, please FReepmail me. Please send me your name by FReepmail if you want to be on this list.